2010 April | From: The Little Pink House

What I learned through (not) Losing It

Apr 302010

I did not lose any weight during the 10 week weight loss competition called “Losing It (not just our sanity)”.

But I was not planning on losing any weight.

I was hoping to become more purposeful about exercise.

That did not happen, either.

(Though, considering that I averaged exercising 1 to 2 times per week during those 10 weeks is actually very good, considering the average of all the previous weeks of our marriage!)

At least I drank lots and lots of water and many cups of tea, to counter all the mugs of coffee and handfuls of chocolate chips!

No, I did not lose any weight. But I don’t count these weeks of Losing It a loss. Because Losing It made me examine my attitude toward exercise, eating, and beauty.

Totally Random

Apr 292010

It’s obvious you pay per text when you use every single one of the 160 characters allowed per message, every single time you text.

It’s clear you are used to tuning out the radio when, two hours after lunch, you realize the baseball game your husband was listening to is still on.

When a hair-cutting mood strikes one on a Sunday afternoon when one’s husband is gone, it would probably be wiser to call one’s sister-in-law or wait a few days. But sometimes, chopping off all your hair is an awful lot of fun (not to mention a great reason to clean the bathroom floor).

Another lesson learned: just because both girls are tired and exhausted and in much need of naps does not in any way, shape, or form mean that they will actually fall asleep on the couch at Aunt Katie’s while Mommy does internet work.

What does it mean when I’m confused by the information in Digital SLR Cameras & Photography for Dummies?

P.S. There’s been a lot of gradual “tweaking” going on at the Little Pink House—both inside the real house, and in our online home! If you haven’t been by lately, come tell me what you think of the new look.

What memories are made of…

Apr 282010

IMG_1330-1

My grandparents came to visit last weekend. For once, things weren’t too busy on the farm. We weren’t remodeling. Or cleaning up the garden for the year. We had time to just visit.

We sat and drank tea—hot tea, iced tea, and watery tea from a tiny aluminum tea pot—and talked about theology and marriage and manners.

Great Grama brought fun new books for the girls. And we found a few more on our now traditional visit to our favorite bookstore.

We dressed up in springy dresses for church on Sunday—Ru in one of her aunt Jessica’s old dresses, Mary in one that was mine. We soaked up the sunshine outside church. We lingered over a Sunday meal out at a new favorite restaurant. We came home and made the first homemade ice cream of the year.

"Better full…"

Apr 262010

I’m over at YLCF today writing about shopping, having my arms full, and being a mom…

It was the week before Thanksgiving. I was taking advantage of the sales to finish my Christmas shopping. It was one of my first attempts at shopping alone with two little girls in tow.
The aisles of boutique shops are rarely wide enough for two people to stand side by side, let alone for a mother to carry an infant car seat on one arm and try to hold a toddler’s hand with the other. I kept turning the infant seat, which meant relinquishing my hold of my little girl’s hand. In addition to lacking a nap, someone was not exactly having her most obedient day ever.
“Keep your hands in your pockets,” worked so well outside in the cold, but in the store it only meant elbows sticking out near the breakables.
“Do not touch,” I instructed her once again, as I tried in vain to find the perfect Fiesta dish for Katie in cobalt blue.
Meanwhile, my daughter was taking me literally. She wasn’t touching. Instead, she was smelling the breakable dishes—which necessitated sticking her entire head in the shelf!
click here to read the rest of the post at ylcf.org…

1,000 Words

Apr 242010

Summer exercise (or "How a farmer’s wife gauges her weight")

Apr 232010

The beautiful weather has arrived, and with it the busyness it brings to our farm. And suddenly, this farmer’s wife has remembered why she doesn’t normally need an exercise program.

As I carried large rocks from my old herb garden site to put around the newly planted fruit trees, I noticed the newly-fixed wheelbarrow. I could use it to move the rocks to and fro, I thought, but no, this way I’m building even more arm muscles than I’ve already obtained carting around my growing girls.

Each time I bent to the laundry basket to hang out laundry loads one through seven this week, I was working on building those abs of steel. And every box I lifted during my frenzied spring cleaning burned at least a few chocolate chips’ worth of calories, I’m sure.

As I changed into work clothes to prune some trees and weed my “ditch” flower bed, I grabbed my old work Levi’s on a whim. Not only did they go on, but they zipped up! An occasion which has not happened since before my last pregnancy.

And that is how a farmer’s wife knows she’s doing enough weeding and housework to make up for the hot chocolate and graham crackers she shares with her hubby when he gets in late at night: when her jeans fit.

Trigger-happy

Apr 222010

I just finished going through all the photos I’ve taken with my new camera.

I desperately needed to delete the bad ones, but that meant figuring out how the camera software worked so that I didn’t keep downloading deleted images over and over again. Which meant figuring out how to save raw images and export movies. And also included deciding how to use both the camera software and Picasa.

I’ve taken a whole lot of pictures in the last month and a half since we got our new Canon G11. Talk about trigger-happy. But then, I always was—even back in the days of film cameras! I do think that digital cameras have enabled us to get more better shots. But I don’t think I, at least, am quite as discretionary about how often I press the shutter.

At least all that clicking away results in a few priceless photos that are worth a thousand words…

But the fact that I have a “bridge” camera (a new-to-me-term for: better than a point and shoot, but not quite a DSLR) means there are a whole lot of features that I have no idea how to use properly. So I have a stack of library books about digital photography sitting in my living room. Which are doing me a lot of good collecting dust, as you can see.

At least I’m learning about ISO by trial and error. Now I have to figure out how to change the shutter speed. And is that the F-stop, or is that something else?

I have a friend with the same camera, but she knows even less about it than I do. We’re hoping to help each other learn about our cameras when she gets back to the area. Meanwhile, I think I better dust off those books before they are due…

Anyone have a favorite book or website to recommend on the basics of digital photography?

On days like today…

Apr 212010

On days like today, I decide to hang out the laundry even though there are grey clouds in the sky, knowing that laundry brings rain, knowing that we need rain for the fields and our newly-planted grass.

On days like today, I pause to admire my laundry hampers—one, made in Africa of elephant grass and goat hide, a wedding present from my sister-in-law. The other, wicker repainted to match the girls’ room, was their “Daddy’s when he was ‘iddle’,” as Ruth likes to say.

On days like today, I don’t mind the little helping hands that get laundry out of the basket faster than I can hang it.

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